There was an issue when there was a leak of windows source code to the internet, and ReactOS effectively had to shut down development for months while all code was audited to make sure no helpful folks had used any of it to 'help' the project.
That's the only MS IP controversy they've been involved in (and I've been watching the project for waaaay too many years now)
(That issue answer reads like someone angry, and with an agenda. It also reads somewhat like the SCO/Linux thing a few years ago - there's no way anyone could write an OS like linux from scratch! It has to be stolen! Also the aforementioned shutdown/cleanup period kinda points to them taking this issue very seriously)
> Many internal data structures and internal functions, not exported anywhere and not part of the public symbols, have the exact same names as they appear in the Research Kernel (which, by the way, is quite obsolete). There is an almost surely zero probability that this happened, at that scale, by accident.
Unfortunately I don’t think anyone who doesn’t have access to the research kernel is capable of answering.
Even if someone had access to compare it, I wouldn't put the probability at 0. Windows has a pretty specific way of naming types, fields and functions. Some of those leak through error messages and other methods of introspection. They're have to match on a few very esoteric private fields to support that argument.
The guy seems to point to the reasons for his opinion, that's why I'm asking. I'm not so invested to check symbol names in the reactos repo vs the leaked code.
There was an issue when there was a leak of windows source code to the internet, and ReactOS effectively had to shut down development for months while all code was audited to make sure no helpful folks had used any of it to 'help' the project.
That's the only MS IP controversy they've been involved in (and I've been watching the project for waaaay too many years now)
(That issue answer reads like someone angry, and with an agenda. It also reads somewhat like the SCO/Linux thing a few years ago - there's no way anyone could write an OS like linux from scratch! It has to be stolen! Also the aforementioned shutdown/cleanup period kinda points to them taking this issue very seriously)